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I Turned Pro

I finally coughed up the twenty five bucks to get a pro account on Flickr! I turned my original account where all the South Carolina Post Office photos to the “pro” level so all of the 390 I have taken so far can been seen, not just the latest 200. I was also bumping into the 200 photo limit on my second free account, so instead of creating yet another free Flickr account I just went ahead and turn Pro.

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Gorram

Watched the rest of the Firefly episodes the other day and I really am bummed, The last one, Objects in Space, was probably my favorite episode.

Maybe I need to watch more stuff on Hulu before it goes away. Everything I have watched the last week or so has a blank commercial advertising on how you should advertise on Hulu. They must not be selling a lot of ads.

I’ve got the Lost Oceanic Airlines T-shirt, so why shouldn’t I get a BlueSun T-shirt?

Have I mentioned lately that you really should go see Iron Man?

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Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/08: 186

Take Me To Your Leader

Two aliens landed in the Arizona desert near a gas station that was closed for the night. They approached one of the gas pumps and the younger alien addressed it saying, “Greetings, Earthling. We come in peace. Take us to your leader.”

The gas pump, of course, didn’t respond.

The younger alien became angry at the lack of response.

The older alien said, “I’d calm down if I were you.”

The younger alien ignored the warning and repeated his greeting. Again, there was no response.

Annoyed by what he perceived to be the pump’s haughty attitude, he drew his ray gun and said impatiently, “Greetings, Earthling. We come in peace. Do not ignore us this way! Take us to your leader or I will fire!”

The older alien again warned his comrade saying, “You probably don’t want to do that! I really don’t think you should make him mad.”

“Rubbish,” replied the cocky, young alien. He aimed his weapon at the pump and opened fire. There was a huge explosion. A massive fireball roared towards them and blew the younger alien off his feet and deposited him a burnt, smoking mess about 200 yards away in a cactus patch.

Half an hour passed. When he finally regained consciousness, he refocused his three eyes, straightened his bent antenna, and looked dazedly at the older, wiser alien who was standing over him shaking his big, green head.

“What a ferocious creature!” exclaimed the young, fried alien. “He damn near killed me! How did you know he was so dangerous?”

The older alien leaned over, placed a friendly feeler on his crispy friend and replied, “If there’s one thing I’ve learned during all my intergalactic travels, you don’t want to mess with a guy who can wrap his penis around himself twice and then stick it in his ear.”

Even Better The Second Time

Went to the movies last night and got home today, well 2:30AM this morning.

Last night the MMC went to the “local” drive-in, The Big Mo, in Monetta, SC. I use Master’s Miata Club loosely, there were three cars that made the trip. Two other cars did show up at Sonic and eat with us, but didn’t go the extra 35 miles to see the movies. That’s right, movies, for six bucks a head you get to see two first run pictures. A couple years back they added a second screen so you actually have a pick of two double features. Screen #2 was showing What Happens In Vegas and Made of Honor, while on the original screen Indiana Jones and Iron Man were playing. Of the three couples going, one had seen the Vegas movie, one had seen the Indiana Jones movie and one had seen Iron Man. Guess which movies we went to see?

Right, the two that started with the letter I. When we got to the drive in they had already been letting cars in for about 10 minutes and the place was already 2/3rds full. We were parked by 7:15 and only had an hour and a half to kill before the first feature started, so we did what happens at any Miata Club gathering, we broke out the food.

First up was Indiana Jones and the Last Temple of the Lost Crystal Kingdom. My wife and I thoroughly enjoyed the first movie, Raiders of the Lost Ark, the next one not so much and skipped the third entirely, so let’s say we were not as excited to see this installment as the other four folks. One, maybe two, cracks about Indy’s age would have been cute, but they got old (pun intended) fast. Don’t get me started on the “thrilling” chase sequence through the jungle… I will have to give them credit as they managed to not fall into the trap of the eternally ready torch (which I have whined about here in the recent past). They had an explanation that worked, for this movie. When entering an ancient crypt deep in a cave below a mountain or pyramid or something in the Andes Mountains, someone yanks a torch off the wall and before he lights it says, “Hey, this is fresh. Someone’s been in here recently.”

The drive in is not an ideal venue for watching a movie (except for the kind they used to show in them in the 70s), so if Donna and I hadn’t seen Iron Man in a nearly ideal setting a couple of weeks ago, seeing it at the Big Mo would have driven me to want to see it in a real movie theater. In spite of a chunk of the bottom right of the screen missing due to the SUV in front of us, the car idling next door so they could run their AC, the steady stream of people passing in front of us on their way to and from the concession stand, the crying baby, the biting ants and knowing what was going to happen next, Iron Man was even better the second time. If you haven’t seen it yet, call in sick to work tomorrow and catch a matinee, you’ll thank me for it.

I wonder if I can pre-order the DVD on Amazon yet? Yep.

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Half Clean

On Memorial Day I spent a good bit of the afternoon pressure washing my driveway and got 1/2 of it done. The neighbors on both sides of us have long single wide driveways and no garage access. They both handle the issue differently, one keeps all three cars in the drive with him doing the parking order shuffle each night depending on the sequence the three drivers are leaving in the morning. The other keeps one car in the driveway and two angle parked on the grass to the side of the drive and one spends the night in the street. Donna and I on the other hand have one car that we park in the garage and a 2 car wide driveway that sits empty.

Jack Sparrow: “Funny ol’ world, innit?”

I Want To Believe this will be a good movie, but it has been a long time, maybe too long. When I stumble on an episode, I can’t watch it (unless of course it is one of about 10 of my favorites.)

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On My Way To Fame (& No Fortune)

About 3 weeks ago I received an email asking for permission to use a photograph of mine that I had on Flickr! called 12-13-2007 Sunrise. It was to be used at the bottom of a page to end a section of a 30 page Executive Summary entitled Savannah River Basin Textile Recovery Plan and Graniteville Area Redevelopment Plan. Yikes, that’s a mouthful. It is a set of recommendations developed over about a year of study for the local economies in Aiken, Abeville, Anderson, Edgefield, Greenwood, Laurens, McCormick, Oconee, Pickens, and Saluda counties that have been negatively impacted by the closures of textile mills and related facilities.

I said go ahead and use it, all I asked in return was that they send me a copy when they were printed. Came in the mail on Friday. Glossy thing with lots of consulting techno-babel that takes up a lot of space and doesn’t say much. I was surprised that mine was the only photograph in the whole thing (aside from the cover.) There were about 250 copies printed up, and the other 249 will be distributed to stakeholders throughout the region (whatever a stakeholder is.) There is a list of them on the back page along with the Project Team, Steering Committee and at the bottom the Photography credit of yours truly.

You can say you knew me when….

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2,701

According to my WordPress dashboard this is post two thousand seven hundred and one. I think there are a lot more, but some must have got lost in the many times I’ve restored from a backup or moved from a different blogging platform. I deduce this from when I went hunting yesterday for mention of when I had painted the bedroom red I’m going to now paint blue. If you check the archive for the month of April 2004 you will see that there are several days of missing posts. There are several days of multiple posts, but that is to be expected because at that time I had two different blogs going, one Miata related and one Rant related. There should be nearly 60 posts per month because then, like now, I rarely missed a night posting on both.

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